Semantic macrostructures, although strangely ignored or ruled outside most formal linguistics and even some methods of discourse analysis, define the general, overall meanings of discourse, informally called ‘topic,’ ‘theme,’ ‘gist,’ or ‘upshot’ and on the basis of the higher levels of the mental models of the social actors. Macro-structural (topical, crucial) information, according to Teun van Dijk, plays a fundamental role in discourse comprehension and recall― although other factors (such as remarkableness, vividness, etc.) may also affect attention, prominent representation, and hence recall. One can summarise a sequence of pictures by a title, like a summary of a movie. Similarly, a trailer serves to summarise the movie and to indicate what makes it different from other movies on the cinema circuit. But can we summarise a sequence of images by another (‘macro’) image or image-topic? This article discusses semantic macro-structures and processes of multimodal discourse comprehension, formulating the mapping rules underlying the global interpretation of political cartoons. The rules for multimodal discourse processing (involving group-specific knowledge) formulated in this study apply to Arabic-speaking audiences, which should be of interest for scholars in intercultural communication and cognition.

语义宏观结构虽然奇怪地被忽视或被排除在大多数形式语言学甚至某些话语分析方法之外，但它定义了话语的一般性、整体意义，非正式地称为“主题”、“主题”、“主旨”或“结果”，并在社会行为者更高层次的心理模型的基础。Teun van Dijk 认为，宏观结构（主题、关键）信息在话语理解和回忆中发挥着基础性作用，尽管其他因素（如显着性、生动性等）也可能影响注意力、突出表征，从而影响回忆。 。人们可以通过标题来总结一系列图片，就像电影的摘要一样。同样，预告片可以总结电影并表明它与电影院中其他电影的不同之处。但是我们可以用另一个（“宏观”）图像或图像主题来总结图像序列吗？本文讨论了多模态话语理解的语义宏观结构和过程，制定了政治漫画全球解释的映射规则。本研究制定的多模态话语处理规则（涉及群体特定知识）适用于阿拉伯语受众，这应该引起跨文化交际和认知学者的兴趣。